If payment protocol was not supported people would be complaining about lack of support for the new merchant integration methods.
Who did complain?
No one yet. But that would happen soon enough after the new BIP007x features are rolled out by other (BitcoinJ) based wallets.
In any case the plan is to split the wallet off to a different repository, so that it can be maintained separately. This means you can create a fork with your own (subset of) features, without forking the entire node implementation as well.
This can happen only after SPV functionality has been implemented though. This would also isolate the wallet from potential bugs in the P2P network code (and vice versa), and also means that even if you run a full node, you don't have to have your wallet always online.